Even before you got into the nitty gritty of your professional life, you always had been watching and learning from your competition—at your school, in your local sports team and everywhere else where you had to perform and you had to face competition.
And now, when you are here – starting your journey as a social media marketer or you may already be a pro, why should it be any different?
After all, social media marketing is a competitive industry, with local and international brands going head to head to tap the huge business opportunity that the platform offers.
By following up with what your competitors are doing across various social media platforms, how they are engaging with customers, what type of posts are they creating – you can improve your social media marketing.
The question is:
How to know what’s your competitor up to?
This is where I delve into my resources of social media marketing tips and tricks and introduce to you some tools to help accomplish the task.
Fanpage Karma for Comparative Analysis
Fanpage Karma allows you to do a comparative study of what you have been doing with your social media marketing efforts and in contrast, what your competition has been doing. The side-by-side comparison can be done for social media accounts including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram.
You can compare growth and engagement patterns, most used keywords, posts that have performed well for the two of you, the engagement time and other key metrics. You can then use this knowledge to assess your strengths and weaknesses and optimize your social media marketing efforts accordingly.
Fanpage Karma offers a freemium model as well as a premium plan for customers.
Twitonomy – Built for Twitter
This tool is exclusively designed to spy on your competitor’s Twitter activity. Through Twitonomy, you can learn how many times your competitor tweets in a day on average, how many favorites and retweets these tweets receive, how many of these tweets had links, mentions, hashtags, retweets and replies, who engages most with your competitor and at what time, and many other such important insights.
With Twitonomy’s premium account, you can have access to a much more expansive pool of data.
SocialMention – What’s Being Said About Your Competitor
SocialMention is a tool that allows you to receive updates every time your competitor is mentioned across blogs and social platforms. You can even set up an RSS feed, to make sure you never miss any mention. By knowing in what context your competitor is being mentioned and following the details of these mentions – you can crack ideas and strategy to supplement your social media marketing strategy.
As a bonus, the tool can also be used to track and monitor keyword mentions—plus, it’s absolutely free!
LikeAlyzer – How is Your Competitor Doing on Facebook?
If Twitonomy is built for Twitter, LikeAlyzer is custom made for Facebook. It allows you to assess the strong and weak points of your competitor’s Facebook page and then compare it with an analysis of your own Facebook page – you can work out what needs to be done and what needs to be avoided when running Facebook based marketing campaigns.
Some key metrics that can be studied with the help of LikeAlyzer are PTAT (People Talking About This), growth, engagement rate etc.
LikeAlyzer also provides you with suggestions on how to improve your own Facebook page by running a quick health check.
So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to put those spyglasses on and make your social marketing campaigns a success.
Looking for more such helpful social media tips and tricks to optimize your social media marketing strategy and efforts?
My blog resources can help you. I, Manal Haddad, have an experience of more than 25 years in business consultancy and development having worked with some of the top business organizations around the world. Whatever I have learnt, I try to word it into informational blog posts for marketers like you. Read, learn, enjoy and share the knowledge!
